


Fix What's Broken

by thefilthiestpiglet



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (just mentions though) - Freeform, Food Issues, HYDRA Trash Party, Hydra Holiday Trash Party Gift Exchange 2020, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Vomiting, fixit fic for Bucky's dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:48:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28343415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefilthiestpiglet/pseuds/thefilthiestpiglet
Summary: Bucky Barnes has a problem: his dick is broken.But Bucky is good at fixing problems.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 18
Kudos: 63
Collections: Hydra Holiday Trash Party Gift Exchange 2020





	1. Problem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dance4thedead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dance4thedead/gifts).



> Happy holidays, dance4thedead! :D
> 
> And thank you for running the HHTP exchange and blessing us with always-amazing trash buckybleeds!

Bucky Barnes has a problem: his dick is broken.

Well, it works just fine for pissing, but for the other function, it just … doesn’t.

It’s not like Bucky doesn’t know what the problem is — HYDRA had decided that his dick was a hassle and had kept it in a cock cage, which, over time, trained it to perform to their expectations. There was the chemical cocktail that they had him on that encouraged compliance and removed libido. And the cryo, and the frequent parties where he was used as a sex favor (while still in the cock cage), not to mention being the occasional guinea pig for whatever hormone suppressants and enhancers the lab coats would cook up.

Fine, Bucky Barnes has a whole host of other problems, including recovering from sexual trauma and dealing with an unreliable brain and learning how to be a person again, but the dick thing is the one he is most presently concerned with, because of one Steve Rogers.

Steve Rogers is the first thing he remembers wanting as his current self. He’s wanted to kiss Steve Rogers since he first saw Steve’s bloodied face on the helicarrier (or was it in the alleyway behind Hammerstein’s Deli?) He wants to kiss Steve whenever he sees Steve look at him through the scope of his sniper rifle, which is why he stays on the rooftops and doesn’t go mingle after the missions. HYDRA has taught him to be very good at self control. He’s not ready to talk to Steve yet. 

Because he first needs to fix his broken dick.

Bucky may not remember much, but he remembers kissing his dates on the steps and being invited in if he was lucky. He remembers saving up money to go to Coney Island with Steve. He remembers walking home with Steve, tipsy and relaxed, and then fucking in Steve’s bed that night. He remembers kissing Steve in a forest after a firefight, and the rough and tumble fucking the kisses always segue into.

Which is to say, if Bucky kisses Steve, it has a high likelihood of leading to fucking, and Steve would expect Bucky’s dick to not be broken. So Bucky has to fix it. If Bucky’s memory serves (which it doesn’t, not always), he used to make a living fixing things like cars or radios, so fixing his dick shouldn’t be too different. Step one is to get the tools of the trade, which is why he’s currently standing outside a sex shop, giving himself this whole damn speech in his not-quite-fixed head. 

Right. Taking a deep breath, he steps into the store.

The first thing he sees is a display of different sized phalluses in a rainbow of colors. Huh. Then he looks up, and along the wall in the back he sees implements that are more familiar to him — instruments designed to inflict pain and equipment designed to hold him immobile. Bucky sucks in a quiet breath and feels his skin thrum with a sickening familiarity. His dick shrinks even smaller as he sees the small display of cock cages, and his stomach starts hurting. 

Fuck. Bucky focuses on a rainbow-colored phallus near him and counts to ten. The phallus says ALSO VIBRATES! in big cheerful letters. HYDRA’s gear tended toward steel and leather and somber blacks. Bucky’s stomach eases a bit, and he gives himself a stern talking-to, just like his self-help book recommended. He is here to fix his dick. That’s all he’s trying to fix. He’s not here to fix all the other things wrong with him. This is just another mission. He doesn’t even have to kill anyone — it’s just simple recon — push through the nausea, acquire the implements, exfiltrate. Doable. Gritting his teeth, Bucky spends precisely 7 minutes and 41 seconds to collect a wide selection of the store’s products, after which he allows himself 3 minutes to have a small panic attack in the bathroom while the helpful yet discreet clerk boxed everything. 

Recon mission successful. 

Bucky carries the unlabeled bag back to his safehouse, climbing in from the roof as he usually does. Steve may live in Avengers Tower, but Bucky prefers the security and privacy of his own safehouse. It’s a former textile factory that someone had bought to make into upscale lofts, but then ran out of money and got stuck in litigation. Hence: safe house. There are no neighbors, the subway stop is a full 8 blocks away, and there’s no curious Avengers. No one to frown at his nightmares, no one to notice if he loses time or gets a panic attack, and no one to ask bothersome questions if he lays out a few dozen sex toys on the fold-out table.

The sight of them brings back several bad memories but he manages to stay in the room. Small steps. One by one, Bucky stares at the sex toys until his skin stops vibrating and his stomach stops feeling queasy. 

By then it is evening, so he pulls out some rations from the food shelf and eats dinner. Steve’s probably eating with the Avengers, with a lot of noise. Laughing at one of Stark’s jokes, maybe. Bucky looks at the brick walls and the empty spaces of his safehouse and tries to imagine Steve here, amongst the pieces of dusty machinery. Sometimes, when he’s bored and can’t sleep, he tries to see if he can fix one of them. Take the gears from one to see if it fits into the other. Maybe Steve could sit by one of the tall windows and sketch while he does his fiddling. Maybe he could put on some music and they’d both have a quiet night in.

No. Bucky shakes out of his fantasy. It’s a safehouse for a reason. Steve shouldn’t see him like this, with all the broken bits laid out. 

Bucky looks back at the folding table with the implements, and takes out a notebook. Right. To work. All he has to do is test out all of these implements on himself and see if any of them trigger positive reactions, and then figure out a way to replicate the positive reaction during sex with Steve. Easy.

Several hours later, Bucky’s notebook is filled with notes of his reactions to different types of anal insertions, pain inflicted over small or large areas and in short or long durations, as well as a small array of the standard bondage and restriction positions. Unfortunately, all he has to show for it is an artificially elevated heart rate, two empty bottles of lube and three panic-induced attempts to vomit into the toilet. And zero cases of arousal. 

Bucky sighs and closes the notebook, putting it away next to his sleeping pallet next to his library books. Time to stop for the night. He turns on the spigot and drags the hose over to fill up his bathtub. His body, tense from the hours of experimentation, loosens in the warm bath, and after he’s scrubbed himself clean of lube and sweat from his experiments, he gently cups his penis in his hands and lays back. From a practical perspective, his hands know what to do — squeezing and stroking at the right places. But no luck. He tries letting his mind wander, he tries focusing on the task. He tries to remember what 1930s Bucky thought about (mostly legs), he tries to remember sex. That last one just gets him dry-heaving over the edge of the tub.

Fuck. Bucky rests his head against the tub in the cooling water, lets out his frustration. The self-help book with the blue cover says that acknowledging feelings and setbacks is an important step to future success, and he definitely feels frustrated at this setback. He just wants to fix one damn thing in his life. He’d figured a broken dick would be one of the easier ones compared to everything else, but of course he’s wrong.

After another two minutes of feeling maudlin, Bucky gets out of the tub and gets dressed. There are sex toys to clean up, and next steps to consider. Cleaning and packing away sex toys is much less fun than cleaning and checking one’s weapons, so afterward, Bucky allows himself a small reward, despite the lack of progress: he goes to the roof and watches the sun rise over the city. 

It’s one of his favorite things about not being the Winter Soldier anymore — no more underground bases, no more cryo, no more being woken up just for a mission with a side of lab tests and rape. Bucky thinks he used to do this sometimes with Steve — sit on the rooftop in the hot summers and just watch the city come awake. Maybe, after he kisses Steve, he can bring Steve here. Not the safehouse, of course, but the roof, maybe. Steve’d also remember what the streets used to smell like. The way they used to sleep on the rooftops when it gets too hot in the summer. Maybe they can complain about all the things that are different now. Point out all the various parts of the city waking up and getting to work. The night shift workers trundling home. 

Bucky needs to fix his broken dick so that he can bring Steve here. Which means he needs outside consultants.

After a breakfast of more nutrition bars, he goes to find the Widow, because if anyone can understand *and* keep a secret, it is Natasha.

He finds her pretending to do a crossword puzzle at a coffeeshop near the Tower. She barely looks up when he sits down at her table. “What’s up, buttercup?”

“I have a problem.”

Natasha continues not-doing her crossword. 

Bucky takes a sip of her coffee. “My dick is broken and I want to fix it.”

Natasha huffs a quiet laugh and asks, “Have you considered finding a doctor?”

Bucky doesn’t even dignify that with an answer. She’d read his files before redacting them for the others. 

Finally, she sighs and moves to idly writing verb conjugations on the newspaper. “What specific aspect of it do you want to fix?”

“It won’t get hard.”

“And you want that because…?”

“Steve would expect it to get hard if I kiss him.” He remembers this. Remembers getting hard just from Steve looking at him. 

Natasha raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? You don’t even *talk* to Steve. I send you mission coordinates, you show up, you shoot things, and then you leave. Maybe step one is to actually stay long enough to talk to Steve.” Then she adds, gently, “He might even help you with your problem.”

Fuck no. This is not a Steve problem. Nothing about Bucky is a Steve problem. Bucky helps Steve with his missions and then goes back to his own safehouse so that Steve doesn’t have to deal with Bucky’s problems. Maybe, if he can fix his dick, he can ask Steve out to a nice dinner. They can talk, and then kiss, and then fuck the way that Bucky remembers them doing, and then Bucky can sit with Steve on the rooftop and watch the sunrise. But first he has to fix his dick.

“No. Fixing my dick comes before talking.”

Natasha frowns at him, and Bucky glares back. The Winter Soldier can outwait any Black Widow. Finally, she sighs as she writes “you are an idiot” in a language that Bucky can read but doesn’t know the name of. (Quechua?) “Well, I’m sure there were times when HYDRA needed you to be aroused. What did they do then?”

Of course. He’s been going about this completely ass-backwards, testing implements that were used when he was in the cock cage. No wonder his dick did’t react. Bucky runs his mind through a typical Winter Soldier wake cycle — cock cage was on for cryo, and always was the last part of him to thaw out. Still on for the mission, and for half of the parties. Sometimes the lab tech would remove it for their experiments. Sometimes, at a party, they would remove it because they wanted him hard — usually to demand that he fuck someone, but sometimes just to hear him beg in a novel way. For those cases, the scientists usually had some sort of injection, which is not going to be easily replicable, but … Bucky frowns. There’s a memory of STRIKE, laughing…and Rumlow. He’d mocked him, about his dick getting hard when they…

Stun baton.

The memory comes rushing back — in the return transport from a mission, STRIKE high on adrenaline and demanding that he suck them off. Rumlow sticking a baton into his ass and telling whoever was fucking his mouth to pull out. And then the white-hot pain sparking from the inside, the split second when his mind goes blissfully, frighteningly blank, and when he comes back, his dick was be hard and straining against the cock cage as Rumlow laughs and laughs. “Oh look, a new way to play. Bring the cock cage back, let’s see if the spikes hurt when we force it back on.” 

Bucky stands up and takes his leave before his nausea betrays him. “Thanks, Natasha. You’ve been a big help.”

Natasha throws the newspaper at him, which he catches and tucks under his arm as he finds the nearest bathroom. It’ll make decent reading material for his panic attack.


	2. More Problems

Bucky Barnes has a new problem: he can’t stun baton himself discreetly.

Liberating a few STRIKE team stun batons out of the Avengers storerooms was easy. Trying it on himself was as mind-numbingly painful as he remembered, but also effective: his dick hardened appropriately and reliably, and stayed hard for at least 15 minutes. There’s still no ejaculation, but that’s something that Bucky can probably fake. Slightly more difficult is controlling his body while the electricity is running through him. Steve will definitely notice if he started jerking or twitching. 

If there’s one thing that Bucky has learned from his time with HYDRA, is that he can be trained to endure anything. After a week of regular practice, he is able to hold his muscles tight and keep his eyes focused on a target as he shocks himself in his prostate. Another few days gets rid of the minor twitching, and he starts being able to smile through the pain. He tries a few times in while looking in the mirror, and confirms that it looks passably realistic.

Which leaves his final stumbling block: he can’t do this in the middle of sex with Steve. If he does it when their bodies are connected, Steve would feel the electricity and get hurt. Steve might also question why he’s shoving a baton up his ass. 

Which means he needs something small, hidden, yet carrying a powerful charge. 

Bucky goes to find the Widow again. This time she is pretending to walk several yappy dogs around Central Park. 

“Your Widow’s Bites have a remote activation mechanism, right?”

Natasha nods as she takes a photo of the dogs and posts it to one of her dog-walking instagram business account. 

“Can I borrow one.”

“Depends. Is it going up your butt?” She is typing something on her phone, probably snapchatting one of the people who think she is Natalie Rushman.

“Yes.” Bucky frowns at the dogs. None of them look like the types of dogs that HYDRA used to sic on him, so he’s not quite sure what they’re for.

Natasha sighs as she hits send. “I’d hoped I was joking.”

“It fixes my problem.”

Natasha pulls the dogs over to sit at a fountain and gestures for Bucky to sit, too. “Are you sure your problem isn’t just that you haven’t talked to Steve?”

“Yes.” When he talks to Steve he wants to have fun conversations, not ones about his broken dick. Ergo, fixing the broken dick.

One of the dogs tries to hump Bucky’s foot, and Natasha looks at the creature for a moment before tugging it back. “Fine. I don’t have any spare ones on me right now. I’ll bring them over later. You still at your safehouse?”

Bucky stands and nods. “Yes. Thanks.” 

Excursion successful, with zero flashbacks or panic attacks. Bucky heads back to his safehouse with a bounce in his step, and takes a detour to restock his food rations. He sees a music store next door with some old records and buys one, thinking back to his fantasy the other day. Would Steve remember this song? He doesn’t have a record player, but maybe he can get one. Bucky imagines sitting with Steve on the roof, listening to the record player. Even if Steve never joins him, he can put on the music and pretend that Steve is there.

And then he rounds the corner to his safehouse and sees Steve Rogers is standing outside, looking lost and attracting way too much attention and making the safehouse decidedly unsafe.

Fuck. The Widow is a sneak and a traitor. Bucky will *not* tell her where his new safehouse is once he moves.

But before that, he’s going to have to talk to Steve, which means the Widow is probably grinning somewhere, maybe getting her nails done. 

Bucky settles his groceries against his metal arm and tries to remember how to smile.

“Steve.”

“Bucky!” Steve waves and beams at him. “Natasha said to come here with this package.” He looks around with interest. “You live around here? Is it one of those live-work lofts?”

Bucky hesitates. “Yes,” he says, finally. The best way to throw Steve off his tracks is to get him to stop looking. A holdover from HYDRA is that he’s not good at lying, especially in answer to direct questions, but he technically will be living around here until Steve leaves, and the floor below his safehouse has some live-work lofts in various stages of completion. 

Steve nods, then squints at the obviously unused door. “May I come in?”

“No.” There’s still sex toys in a bag, his “bed” is a pallet with emergency restraints for when he can’t sleep properly, and there are only protein bars on the food shelf. Steve doesn’t need to see how he lives like a piece of salvaged machinery in an abandoned warehouse.

Steve does a decent job of hiding his disappointment as he hands the box over. “Nat wanted me to give you this.”

“Thanks.”

Steve stuffs his hands in his pockets and asks, “Some secret spy stuff inside?”

Bucky knows Steve is trying to be friendly, perhaps trying to find an excuse to linger and talk more. But this is even more proof that he is not ready to talk to Steve: he can identify the correct response — make a joke about spies while deflecting the question, but words dry on his throat.

Steve sighs as the silence drags on. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, Bucky. I know I make you uncomfortable.” Steve’s jaw twitches, and Bucky watches the enthusiasm and curiosity from earlier leech away. “I’ll, um, see you at the next mission.” Steve lifts a hand abortively, then abruptly turns to walk away.

This is his first time not seeing Steve through a scope. He doesn’t want Steve to walk away like this. Bucky stares at the box in his hand. Can he count on the Widow’s Bite working? “The box. I’m hoping it can fix something.”

Steve stops, but doesn’t turn around, and that’s enough for Bucky to be able to push the rest of the words out. “I… I have plans, to invite you to a dinner and a walk, like we used to do, back then.” Bucky keeps his eyes pinned to a point on Steve’s shoulder. His plans sound so small when he says them out loud. 

Finally, Steve turns, and his face is cracking with emotion. “You remember?”

Bucky nods. “I don’t think I’m ready yet. But.” He hefted the box. “This helps a lot.”

Steve breaks into a happy, warm smile, and it lights up his eyes. “Take all the time you need, Bucky.” He bounces a few times on his toes, clearly vibrating with excitement. “When you’re ready, just say the word and I’ll be here with bells on.” Steve grins, like it’s Christmas come early. 

Bucky blinks. “Okay.” Steve bounces one more time and then heads back down the street, this time much less forlorn. Bucky feels a smile tug at his lips. He stated his plan, and Steve had said yes. And he didn’t even have to practice in front of the mirror for a day. Maybe he *should* have been talking to Steve about this. 

Bucky heads back up to his no-longer-a-safehouse with a grin. He’ll move first, and then he can set this place up to look like a person lives there, and then he can invite Steve in. He’ll definitely have to get a record player now.

That night, Bucky moves across the river to his secondary safehouse. It’s an easy move, all told — All his weapons fit inside one duffle bag and his personal items fit in a backpack (3 shirts, toiletries, 5 library books, and the restraints from the bed.) But it’s also a miserable night — he forgets to bring the pallet and the mattress in the secondary safehouse is too soft and uncomfortable. The lighting is wrong, there are too many walls and small rooms, there’s no rooftop, and the new corner store doesn’t sell adequate nutrition bars. Bucky hates the Widow a little bit.

But Steve had smiled, his new safehouse has a built-in tub, and the steps between testing the Widow’s Bite and inviting Steve to a dinner-and-more are clear and executable. So Bucky can’t hate Natasha too much. 

He needs to go back to his no-longer-a-safehouse tomorrow to get the pallet so that he can sleep better, though.


	3. The Big Night

The next few weeks are a blur of fixing things— it takes him a few painful days to adjust to the different shock level of the Widow’s Bite and get his dick working again. Then he spends a few weeks fixing one of the loft spaces at the no-longer-a-safehouse to a state fitting for human habitation. After he drags in the last piece of furniture, he sends Steve a note to set up a dinner time, and spends the rest of the week practicing talking in front of the mirror. The words within of his chosen topics of conversation start coming in easier, and he can look himself in the eyes with relative frequency. He also buys himself a proper suit and a record player.

With that, he’s ready.

The evening starts well. Bucky ties his hair back in a short braid that allows his face to approximate the photo of himself from the 1930s. He wears a starched shirt, which makes Steve laugh when he picks him up at the Tower. He’d chosen a small diner with good sight lines and defensible booths, and they sit and talk about baseball and the other topics that Bucky had prepared, and halfway through dinner Steve wraps his foot around Bucky’s and looks at him with a sly grin. Bucky stammers a bit but recovers by reciprocating. After dinner, they meander along the pier for a bit and Bucky subtly directs Steve back to the back entrance of his loft-to-show-Steve.

Steve looks up at the building, then looks at Bucky, eyebrow quirked. “Gonna invite me up this time, or should I head home?”

Bucky opens the door for Steve with a smile and a sweep of his arm. “I’m ready now. Up the stairs and to the left.” 

Once inside, Steve gives the perfectly normal furnishings barely a glance, and walks straight to the couch that Bucky had lugged up the stairs the week before. Bucky walks into the newly-tiled kitchen and fusses with the stove, thankful he’d tried all of the appliances when he bought them. “Want some tea? Or maybe…” What did they used to do? “Turn on the radio or put on a record?” 

Steve laughs. “Thank god you’re not asking me to play MarioKart. I’ve missed this, Buck. You got any good records?” Bucky sets the water to boil and moves to put on the record he’d bought. Soon Louis Armstrong’s trumpet fills the room and Bucky’s mind settles into a calm he hasn’t felt since cryo. When he turns to Steve, he is sprawled out on the couch, legs akimbo and looking at Bucky with a particular light in his eyes. “Well, Bucky. You took me out to a lovely dinner and a walk. What do you have in mind next?” There’s a tilt to his chin, the one that says “I double-dog dare you” and “I’m ready for it, what about you?” 

Taking a deep breath, Bucky sits down next to him, and pulls him into a kiss. 

Oh god it is even better than he remembered, than he’s allowed himself to want. Steve, lips soft and tentative at first, but at Bucky’s slight parting of his own lips, darts forward with his tongue. Bucky opens himself further and accepts Steve’s kiss. It’s like finally being allowed a drink of water after a 30 hour stake-out. It’s like the cool of surrender to the cryo without the pain and the million tiny deaths as his cells froze. It’s … Bucky frowns. There’s a tightness in his dick that wasn’t there before, a growing sense of … fullness. 

“Um.” He says, pulling back. The Widow’s Bite is still in his pocket. (After much consideration, he’d decided not to have it pre-inserted, in case Steve wants to fuck him first — easier to hide a flaccid dick than to explain the Bite.)

Steve stops immediately. “Are you okay, Bucky? Was that too much?”

Bucky takes a long, assessing breath. “No, not too much. Just.” Bucky searches for the right word. Not unexpected, because if he said that Steve would stop. “It’s been a long time. Needed a breather. Can we… do more?”

Steve didn’t need any more encouragement. He straddles Bucky and reaches his hands underneath Bucky’s shirt to run along his sides as he tackles Bucky’s mouth, and oh. It’s like all the pleasures of the kiss, except along his *whole body*. The low-level thrum of his body quiets under Steve’s touch, like a machine that’s had a loose nut rattling around, finally being tuned by an expert mechanic.

His dick is definitely hard now. Steve murmurs with pleasure and grinds against as they kiss some more. Bucky spares half a mind to marvel at the fact that he’s hard without the assistance of electricity. Odd, to not have it be accompanied by the feeling of pain, neither the overwhelming shock to his prostate nor persistent constriction of a cock cage against his hard cock, the pinpricks of pain from the spikes punctuating the strain from the metal bars. 

Thinking about that brings some queasiness and Bucky shifts awkwardly, deeply aware that Steve is still sitting on his cock. “Bucky, you want…” Steve is breathless as he pulls out of the kiss, but mercifully gets up without noticing Bucky’s deflating dick. Somewhere, the record had played to the end and is now spinning idly. Right. Bucky had a plan: dinner, walk, kiss, fuck, then the roof.

“Bed.” Bucky pulls Steve toward the bed that Bucky had moved in the same day as the couch. He’d gotten a neutral gray sheet set for it, which Steve hopefully won’t notice that it has never been slept in. He takes off his clothes before the nervousness catches up, and manages to slip his Widow’s Bite into the bedside drawer before he’s tackled by Steve into another kiss. 

This kiss is probably as good or even better than the other ones, but now that he is thinking about sex, it does very little to settle the queasiness at the pit of his stomach. Bucky grabs his dick firmly in his hand and pumps it, willing it to stay hard. Maybe if he keeps holding it like this, it’ll provide a facsimile of hardness.

This, of course, attracts the attention of Steve. Nuzzling against Bucky’s neck, he chuckles, “Desperate, Bucky? You wanna? In me? Wanna feel you inside.”

And for a second Bucky is back with HYDRA, being ordered to fuck a woman. She starts squirming and hissing when she realizes that his cock is covered with capsaicin. His cock feels like it's on fire at it slides in and out of her. Bucky can’t help making a choked-off sound as his dick deflates further, and now Steve is looking at him curiously. “Everything all right, Buck?”

Bucky swallows and covers for himself by getting the lube from the drawer, hand still firmly on his own dick. “Yeah. Just wanna ease into this.” He hands the lube to Steve and turns to press himself against the bed, hiding his face and his cock. “I’ve forgotten half of it, so how about you fuck me first.” This way Steve can be guaranteed pleasure, and Bucky can figure out step two later. Say he’s too tired, maybe. Or just use the Bite. 

Steve growls in assent and plants a row of kisses down Bucky’s back. Bucky experimentally humps the bed a little and feels the friction rub not unpleasantly against his dick. So far so good. "C'mon, Steve."

Then Steve’s slicked up finger presses against his asshole and suddenly it’s taking all of his willpower to not jerk away. It feels like ants are crawling up Bucky’s skin as he holds still against Steve’s fingers. He stares resolutely at the gray bedsheets and really wishes he bought something with an interesting pattern that he can focus on. His dick has shriveled up and died, and now Bucky’s sole mission is to get through this without ruining Steve’s night.

Steve must sense some of Bucky’s tension because he pauses, two fingers in, and asks, “This okay, Bucky?”

By some miracle, Bucky’s voice comes out steady when he answers, “Yeah. Just nerves. I’ve been wanting this for a while. Can’t believe it’s actually happening.”

Steve chuckled. “Me, too, Buck.” He runs a hand gently down Bucky’s back and then kisses Bucky’s shoulders. “Thank you, Bucky. Last month, you weren’t even talking to me. I’d never thought we’d be able to have this back.”

Bucky pressed his face against the mattress and tried to quell his queasy stomach. “You don’t have it back yet, Steve. C’mon, my dick isn’t getting any harder.”

With chuckle and a playful slap on his ass, Steve presses in.

His face is buried in the Secretary’s crotch, and the smooth fabric of the gray slacks are all he can see. Someone is fucking his ass, and the Secretary is talking to the man. The Asset tried to feel nothing, hear nothing, and just let its body be used. Sometimes the man fucking it would hit a sensitive part which would make its dick try to harden against its cage, drawing blood. The Asset takes deep breaths against the cock in its mouth and focuses on feeling nothing. Finally, the man finishes inside, and pulls out with a slick pop. The Secretary runs a hand through the Asset’s hair and the Asset can’t help leaning into the gentle touch…

“Hey Bucky.” 

Bucky blinks and nods jerkily, then shifts a little so that Steve’s hand moves from running through Bucky’s hair to running along his neck and shoulders. He takes a deep breath. “Hey Steve.” He buries his head more firmly against Steve’s shoulder. “Sorry, went elsewhere when I came.” At least the first part of that wasn’t a lie, and the orgasm neatly explains his flaccid dick.

Steve laughs against him as he idly massages Bucky’s back. “That intense, huh?” Bucky nods and tries to ground himself with Steve’s gentle touches, each finger sending pleasing sparks down his skin. But it’s not enough. His stomach is still roiling, and he can’t stop thinking about Pierce touching him this way. As if he were a thing to be claimed. (Because he was.)

Bucky shifts back to sitting. Steve props himself up and asks hopefully, “Your turn?”

Bucky shakes his head. “I’m pretty tired. Maybe let’s do it in the morning?” Plenty of time to recover as Steve sleeps. Then he can slip the Widow’s Bite in before Steve wakes up and perform as expected. 

“Sounds good.” Steve nods and yawns. 

The nausea makes it hard to stand, but Bucky breathes through it, like he does with everything. “Need a piss and some water. You want any?”

“Sure.”

The moment the bathroom door is closed, Bucky sinks down to the ground and allows his body to take over. It’s all right, he’s made it. All that’s left is some cuddling, pretending to fall asleep next to Steve, some early morning sex, and then, the roof. 

Bucky’s mastered the art of the silent panic attack — HYDRA’s long since trained any unwanted sounds out of him. After the usual round of unhelpful retching, Bucky flushes the toilet, rinses his mouth, fills a cup with water, and heads back out.

Steve is sitting on the bed with his shirt and underwear back on, an odd look on his face.

“Bucky, why do you have Natasha’s weapon next to the lube?” Fuck. Of course Steve would try to be helpful and put stuff away.

Words are stuck in his throat again. This is not one of the topics of conversation that he’d practiced. Body running on autopilot, he silently offers Steve the cup of water. 

Steve takes the water and puts it on the bedside table, next to the Widow’s Bite. “Was this what was in the package that I delivered to you?” Steve frowns. “The thing you said was going to help you with tonight.”

Buck briefly considers lying. But there’s lying through omission (as was his plan), and lying to Steve’s face just as he’s about to figure it out. He stays rooted to the floor as the words come out of him. “It’s an assistive device. For sex.”

“For sex?” Steve’s frown shifts from perplexity to concern. “I’ve read that some people are into e-stim, but wouldn’t the voltage on that be too much?”

He can’t say this while looking at Steve. It’s the conversation he was hoping to avoid, but HYDRA’s taught him how to do things he didn’t want to do: find the quiet empty part inside of him and push through. Bucky sits down on the ground next to the bed and tries to explain. “It’s like having glasses — some people need glasses to see. I need at least 100 volts to get hard.” He pauses, thinking about the kissing on the couch. “Or at least, it provides reliability.”

“It’s designed to incapacitate an average human, and you put it…” Bucky can hear the concern in Steve’s voice as he narrows down the possible applications of the Widow’s Bite to trigger arousal. Bucky knows all the answers are not pleasant ones, having tried all of them on himself over the past month. 

“It doesn’t really hurt that much, and there’s no lasting pain. It gets the job done.” At Steve’s note of protest, Bucky adds, “My dick doesn’t respond to the normal stimulants anymore.” 

Above him, Steve shifts uncomfortably. “So when I fucked you…”

Bucky looks away. “It was fine. I asked for it.”

“Bucky, that’s *not* fine. You shouldn’t have to hurt yourself just because …” Steve doesn’t sound disappointed or appalled. Instead, he sounds worried, which is worse.

Bucky gets up and sits on the bed to face Steve. “Well I say it was fine. There was a problem, I figured out a way to fix it. I asked you to fuck me. So it was fine.” Bucky glares at Steve, willing him to accept this, but where Natasha had backed down, Steve just glares back.

It’s Bucky who ends up looking away first. “Fine, my dick’s broken, and you don’t like my solution. No fucking the broken guy.” Steve makes a noise at that, but Bucky pushes on. Maybe if he says it fast enough, he can still salvage something. “Those ten minutes aside, I liked everything else tonight. The food, the walk, the kissing. At least that part, we can try again next week?” He licks his lips and tries to remember how to look inviting. 

The look that Steve gives him was decidedly not impressed. “Sure. Maybe next time you’ll show me your *real* place?”

Bucky blinks. “What gave it away?”

“I spent two years barely living in my apartment in DC. I know what that looks like.” Steve looks around. “This is page 42 of the Home and Furnishings catalogue.”

Steve spends barely three hours with Bucky and he manages to see through all of Bucky’s work of the last month. At this point, Bucky can’t even find it in himself to be angry at Steve. Laughing helplessly, Bucky flops down on the bed. “This is what I get for trying to pull the wool over your eyes.” The bedsheet is still the same horrible gray. “But these are my problems, Steve. I don’t want to lay it on you.”

Steve sighs, too. “I get it, Buck. We did this back in the day, too, this dance. Both of us wanting to solve our own problems ourselves. Keeping secrets until it burned us hollow and started spreading to our relationship.” Steve reaches down and gently entwines his fingers with Bucky’s. “It took you 17 months before you told me you picked up an extra job to bring in the extra income.” Steve shook his head. “You let me think you were always out with a girl. You didn’t tell me until I suggested that I move out to make room for your girl. Or that time in ’37 where I’d lost my job in October and didn’t tell you until February. Left every morning and would try to sell caricatures by the bridge. You didn’t find out until I came down with pneumonia and you called Mr. Gessel to ask for a day off on my behalf.” 

Bucky thinks about his actual safehouse, with the pallet and the restraints and the protein bars. And the fact that he hasn’t really talked to Steve outside of a mission. And the entirety of the last month, trying to fix himself enough that he can put on a brave front for Steve.

“How did we handle this, before?”

Steve shrugs. “Got good at detecting each other’s bullshit. Poked and got in each other’s faces about it.”

Bucky tries to imagine what that’d be like. Well, there *was* something about Steve that’s been needling him. “You haven’t been sleeping much, have you? You were fidgeting so much on the last mission.” He’d seen Steve’s gloved hand twitching against his shield through the scope and his brain had offered up a memory of Steve, tapping his fingers against the table as he stayed up all night to finish a big art project. 

Steve exhales and pulls Bucky’s hand to lay over his chest. “Yup, you caught me. I get nightmares 3 nights out of a week — the usual stuff of shelling, you falling, or me freezing. The newest addition is the one where where everyone I know betrays me.” Bucky can feel the rumble of Steve’s voice through his hand. “People don’t usually notice because I’m pretty functional on less sleep.”

This knowledge soothes something in Bucky, enough for him to share something of his own. “My real bed is a pallet. I’ve drilled some restraints along the sides. I don’t use them every day, but sometimes having those heavy locks is the only way to fall asleep.”

Steve nods. “Show me some time?”

With Steve here, already seeing through his efforts of the last month and yet still inexplicably *around*, it doesn’t seem as impossible to show him the rest of his broken-ness. Bucky gets up and pulls Steve up with him. “Come to the third floor with me.”

He leads Steve up the stairs and opens the door to the open floor of the half-disassembled machines, and, in the corner, the remnants of his safehouse. “I moved after you visited last time, but the pallet would go there.” Bucky gestures at the empty space framed by heavy D-rings embedded into the floor. Then, in the other direction, “Food shelf where I kept my rations, sink, tub.”

Steve runs a hand along the tub and looks up, smiling. “Remember the tub we had in our kitchen?” Bucky nods, relieved that Steve isn’t commenting on the sparseness of Bucky’s safehouse — no couch, no TV, no kitchen, no bedroom. Not even a door for the bathroom.

Steve is standing in front of the food shelf, now. “Hope you’ve been eating to keep yourself healthy, Buck.”

Bucky shrugs. “Sufficient nutrients for daily function. Not starving myself or anything.”

“I’d do that sometimes, you know?” Steve murmured, barely above a whisper. “Just try not eating and see how long I can go. See if it impacts my performance.”

Bucky swallows against the sudden fluttering in his throat. “You eat with the Avengers, now.” He’s been staying away, but if Steve’s been starving himself…

Steve nods. “It was mostly when I first got out of the ice — there wasn’t anyone around to notice, and …” He shrugs. “Mostly I just wanted to feel my body struggle with something, and there weren’t always missions readily available.” 

Bucky’s mind serves up a memory of Steve, too sick to go out for a protest and willfully pouting in bed. Steve has always needed purpose and action. “Well, come back downstairs. You can’t tell me these things and not let me feed you.” 

Steve rolls his eyes as he follows obediently back down to the loft. “Is this 1937 again? Gonna make sure I get my liver pills and spinach every night?” 

“Yup.” Bucky puts on the record again and whips up a quick omelette, glad that he’d stocked the fridge with people food in his attempt to create a facsimile of a regular kitchen.

Steve digs in the moment he sets the plate down in front of him, only looking up halfway through to quirk an eyebrow at Bucky. “Not hungry yourself?”

Bucky shakes his head. “Playing it safe. A lot of things now make me throw up. Killing people, new situations, new foods…” He pauses, wondering if he should go on, but Steve’s already figured it out.

“When you were in the bathroom just now.”

Bucky nods jerkily.

“What did you redact from the files, Bucky?” Steve asked softly. “Why do you need a Widow’s Bite to get hard?”

It’s easier to speak now, after they’ve said all those other things. “It made me easier to maintain, to have my dick in a cock cage most of the time. And for the other part … well, when you have a mindlessly obedient thing…” Steve nods, the understanding and the pain clear on his face. Bucky feels a wave of relief at not having to explain or make excuses or endure looks of shock or pity. “… guess my cock learned to not react when they’d fuck me. I’ve tried a lot of other things — this is the only thing that’s worked.”

“And also kissing,” Steve points out. “Unless what I felt against your pants earlier was a gun or something.”

Bucky scratches his head. “Yeah, that was unexpected. Went away when we started fucking, though.” 

Steve considers this for a moment, finishing the rest of his omelette. “What about blowjobs?”

Bucky thinks. Would that be more or less triggering than getting fucked? He wasn’t able to test this with his sex implements. “I think sucking people off isn’t much different from other common types of sexual stimulation. Might be worse in some situations.” Offices. Dinner parties. Showers. He only takes baths now because when he hears the sound of the water spray and feels the patter of warm water droplets, all he can think of is spending every post-mission STRIKE shower on his knees sucking people off. Only time they let him take a shower.

Steve makes a face, half wistful and half frown. “All right, noted. But I meant the other way around. What about if *I* sucked *your* cock?”

Bucky blinks. Theoretically, Bucky knows that other people are capable of sucking cock, and since he has a cock, ergo, people are capable of sucking it. But he doesn’t remember ever experiencing it from that side — it’s always been Bucky on his knees, even before the war. What would it feel like? Maybe it’d be like kissing, except that Steve’d be kissing his dick.

Oh. His dick is definitely stirring in interest.

Bucky leans into Steve and pulls him into a long, gentle kiss. His dick is *definitely* interested, now. He whispers against Steve’s neck, “I don’t know, but I’d like to try.”

This elicits a low, rumbly chuckle from Steve, and he lets Steve lead him back into the bedroom.

His dick is still pretty broken, but it’s not the only thing to be fixed. Maybe later, Bucky can see if he can fall asleep with the weight of Steve on top of him, holding him down. And when they wake up, they can eat breakfast on the roof and watch the sun rise. Put on a record, maybe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Steve's coping mechanisms aren't that great, either. Thankfully they can now keep each other accountable!

**Author's Note:**

> I originally intended this to be a reverse of Horizontal Tango, as in, 5 times that Bucky forced his dick to work (through horribad shenanigans), and one time it didn't. But somehow I wrote the first line at 2am one night and it turned into this. Dance4thedead -- if you'd prefer more different broken dick, tell me and I'll see if I can figure out the 5+1 version! :)


End file.
